The Mini Companion Cube™ Instruction Manual

Thank you for buying the Aperture Science Mini Companion Cube™ 

Please read the following pages to familiarise yourself with all aspects of your Mini Companion Cube™.

The benefits of owning Mini Companion Cube™ 

-Heavy enough to hold down a whole piece of paper
-More portable than the average sized weighted companion cube
-Will soak up all the love and affection you desire to give it.*
- Mini Companion Cube™ can absorb radiation and it is advised to use your Mini Companion Cube™ in the event of nuclear fallout. If death occurs, please return faulty Mini Companion Cube™ to the Apeture Science laboratories for testing along with your receipt.

*Apeture Science is not responsible for the Mini Companion Cube™ in any way and cannot be held accountable if the Mini Companion Cube™ does not return your affections.

Care of your new Mini Companion Cube™
Apeture Science recommends the following products to keep your Mini Companion Cube™ happy and healthy for life:
- Specifically designed to release a citrus smell when squeezed, the Aperture Science HappyLemon™ will entertain and please your Mini Companion Cube™ and keep its coat looking shiny. (HappyLemon™ - for when life gives you too many ****ing lemons)
- Apeture Science Cake, available exclusively from Apeture Science laboratories. Please submit yourself for testing and we will provide you with enough cake to feed your Mini Companion Cube™ for a month. (Nothing says love like a piece of cake made with science!)

Do not place your Mini Companion Cube™ in direct sunlight.
If Mini Companion Cube™ gets dirty, gently wash with acid.
Do not feed you Mini Companion Cube™ meat, baked beans or full fat milk.
Do not allow your Mini Companion Cube™ to wear hats, shoes with laces or necklaces.

CAUTION While your Mini Companion Cube™ can be used to wedge open doors, distract feral animals and as a stepping stone when traversing lava, Aperture Science does not recommend:

- Using your Mini Companion Cube™ in space. The Mini Companion Cube™ is allergic to several species of creature common in space. In the event of your Mini Companion Cube™ coming into contact with tribbles or wookies, please wash your Mini Companion Cube™ thoroughly before putting it in a quarantine vacuum for a period of 30 days.
- Allowing small mammals or children near the Mini Companion Cube™. This may cause the Mini Companion Cube™ to become depressed and/or suicidal. It is recommended to keep your Mini Companion Cube™ out of reach, preferably in a high place. For access to high places use the new HandyPortal™, your very own portal gun for use around house and home, available from your local Aperture Science megastore.
- Damaging your Mini Companion Cube™. This includes damage by knife attack, bombs, fire, water, decapitation, blunt force (including sledgehammers and car crushers), silver, stakes and garlic.
- Allowing any robots near your Mini Companion Cube™. All types of Companion Cube will suffer at the hands of robots so it is advised not to allow any robots to play, speak or maim your Mini Companion Cube™. Apeture Science cannot be held responsible for misuse of the Mini Companion Cube™ but any data collected from accidents, along with relevant corpses, documentation and Mini Companion Cubes™ can be used to offset doctor or funeral fees.

Elder Sign

A lot of games I’ve been playing recently have been somewhat depressing. I’ve killed a lot of random monsters, battled zombies and run around demon-infested dimensions. With that in mind, I decided to buy something more light-hearted and uplifting. So Elder Sign was, of course, my first choice, as it’s full of fluffy bunnies and rainbows. It bills itself as a ‘game of suspense and supernatural investigation’ by which I assume it means ‘like Cluedo with hysterical and/or maniacal laughter’. It’s not, but more on that later.

It comes with over three hundred pieces (including cards, various counters and tokens) and the rulebook is almost twenty pages long so it’s not exactly the most simplistic of games. But if you can deal with spending some time to learn the game play, it’s remarkably straightforward. Most turns will consist of similar actions as you attempt to defeat the various monsters, ghouls and fluffy bunnies that pop up so you’ll find you learn the core game play quite quickly. What’s more tricky is keeping track of the other things in play that will affect what you can and can’t do.
The game revolves around one of the ancient evils from the Cthulhu mythos preparing a visit to his, hers or, in most cases, its favourite local museum. This impending visit is so exciting that lots of other terrifying creatures make haste to the museum and proceed to make a bit of a mess. The players, as people investigating the mess, must attempt not only to glue the priceless ming vase back together but stop the visiting ancient evil from getting past the front door (not that they need to – all ancient evils are bigger than the average elephant and are likely to get stuck in the turnstyle on the way in). And thus begins a fight against time as, at the stroke of midnight, each night, the ancient evil gets closer. The players need to collect ‘elder signs’ which, like a preserved shark to any sane human being, makes the ancient evil think twice about visiting. They do this by fulfilling tasks around the museum, which are randomly selected from a deck of cards. The harder the tasks, the bigger the reward if you complete it and the penalties if you fail. After each turn, the play advances the time by three hours, which changes certain cards and refreshes player abilities. Various instances advance the coming of the ancient evil. In my first game, these instances mainly came in the form of complete and utter failure coupled with a certain amount of pig-headedness that I was going to going to conquer the task, regardless of how long it took me and how many characters I killed in the process. Because death is not particularly a problem. I mean, ok, it’s a bit of a set back as you lose everything your previous character had. But you do get to come back with a new face, ability and items so I was quite happy to dive into a fight I couldn’t possibly win. Sometimes I’d come back as someone with a hat, which is always a plus in these situations.
Unfortunately, on my first play through, I did fail to win. Yig waltzed through the door, killed me before I had time to scream inarticulately and set about rearranging the world to his specifications, i.e. on fire.

But I still enjoyed myself immensely and I’m definitely going to bothering other people into playing it.
That said, I don’t actually have to. Elder Sign is quite flexible, as it can be played on your own or with seven other minions…I mean friends. That and everyone wins or everyone loses – it’s a co-operative game, all of you against the lumbering horror stuck in the turnstyle. It does eliminate the chance of people getting annoyed at each other for backstabbing so you can focus on getting annoyed because someone failed a roll and allowed the ancient evil to send the entire world insane. But at least you can be annoyed co-operatively.
One last point to make is that the game is absolutely beautiful. Out of all the games I own, this is definitely the nicest. There haven’t been any corners cut and it makes it a real pleasure to play.

Anyway, Elder Sign is brilliant and definitely worth the investment. Go, get.

John Carter

I am nothing if not punctual.
Or, you know, the other thing. Late.
Really really late.
On an entirely different note, I watched John Carter yesterday. It was…well it was terrible. And that’s a real shame because it could have been seriously good.
At first glance, it looks like the sort of film made in the first half of the 1900s, with added spaceships and some aliens that are half ant, half human.
After that, you’ll notice the hammy script, which also seems to be nicked from the early days of film. There are a lot of inconsistencies. Johnny boy contradicts himself notably several times and people’s personalities seem to skid madly from believable to cliché. The woman of the film, Dejah Thoris, is a fighter and some sort of sciencey person. But the science bit doesn’t come up all that much, aside from at the beginning to serve the plot line. And she occasionally turns into a damsel into distress and forgets how to use a sword. Also, her accent waddles around from Middle Eastern to the actress’s more native American.
John Carter himself is as boring as no-fat cheese. It looks like cheese and it slices like cheese but there’s nothing to it but dullness and disappointment. He’s not funny and he’s not loveable and he’s not wise. He’s a bloke, who gets transported to Mars and fights a lot. Often, he is sporting a Hercules fancy dress costume. Oh, and he has a back-story, which will seem oddly familiar to anyone whose watched, glimpsed or heard about Gladiator. Except it’s not done anywhere near as well. There are, for instance, no fields of golden crops, blowing in the wind. Mr Carter also doesn’t appear to age, which considering he is ten years older at the start of film (before we go back to the start of the actual story, per se), is…an interesting choice.
It’s really no wonder that it was a total flop. There is so much potential, so much that could have gone right but they tried to make it so big, they were left with an outer shell and nothing in the middle. Visually, it’s a stunningly beautiful film. And the story is, well, perhaps a little rough around the edges. But with a war between a moving city and another, stationary one and the ant people looking on, mysterious men who call themselves messengers of the gods and one bloke from an entirely different planet, it could have been something truly special. There are some characters who should have got a lot more screen time and there are some genuinely funny moments. The aforementioned spaceships are nicely done, although exactly how they work is glossed over as is Carter’s ability to leap vast distances. But it takes itself just that little bit too seriously, as can be witnessed whenever there’s a salute from Carter’s direction. It tried to be an epic.
Even Star Wars, didn’t attempt to be an epic and look at the fan base that created. It would be nice to see someone try to re-make it (John Carter, not Star Wars. You can keep your mitts off that.), with James Purefoy playing the lead role. He gets very little screen time considering how great his character is and if someone could transplant Kantos Kan’s personality onto Carter’s, that’d add more fat to the cheese than is probably healthy.

Divergent by Veronica Roth

I bought Divergent as one of my ‘stab in the dark’ choices. I barely looked at the back cover, glancing briefly to make sure it wasn’t a Twilight knockoff before adding it to the large pile of books I wanted to buy.
As a result, it’s been sitting in my ‘to read’ pile for a while, looking at me forlornly. I’m generally less optimistic about books I don’t know anything about. But I decided to pick it up for a spot of lunchtime reading. Sometime later, I put it down again, having finished, and realised it was dark outside. All in all, with a few breaks, it took me just over six hours to read Divergent and that is a test to its quality, not its length.
It’s a tasty mix of The Hunger Games, Inside Out and Harry Potter. There’s a good deal of violence, a love story and a very well built world. It, like the aforementioned Hunger Games, manages to have a fantasy feel without ever going beyond the bounds of what a human can do. There’s desperation, decisions not entirely thought through and something going on at the top that isn’t quite kosher. You won’t find dragons, magic or gods here. Just people.
Divergent is set in a world that could be ours if you add in a massive war and a serious change in politics. The people are split into five group depending on what they think would heal the world: selflessness, happiness, knowledge, truth or courage. That’s the bit that reminds me most of Harry Potter - them gryffindors are all about the courage. Anyway, our heroine and family belongs to the selfless faction, but when she reaches the age of sixteen she gets to choose her faction. If she chooses any other faction than her own, she’ll be cutting most ties with her family. People who change faction are not well liked.
Annnnd that’s all I’m going to say about the plot. Because if I said anything more, it would ruin the book. The blurb is equally evasive and I can’t help but applaud that decision. You really should know as little about this book before you dive in. Because even our heroine’s choice in faction is not certain.
That said, some of the reveals are easy to see coming but it didn’t ruin my enjoyment one iota. They weren’t big plot points, just bits about characters that I guessed sometime in advance of the reveal. The main reveal was pretty well camouflaged.
My only real complaint would be that the build up to the ending was very short and not particularly large. That said I’m eagerly awaiting the second book, out on the first of May.

By Light Alone by Adam Roberts

It hate it when something I'm really looking forward to manages to dissapoint me so completely.

The premise of 'By Light Alone' is so intriguing, so well thought out that I had to buy it. It sounded like a novel I could really enjoy. The basic premise: a science, wherein people can grow hair that synthesises food from the sun, rendering hunger a thing of the past, has been implemented some time in the past. Food is scarce but the rich still eat real food because they can. In the midst of this, a rich man’s daughter is kidnapped and, for a year, lives as one of the poor, with long photosynthising hair.

All of that you can learn from the blurb. Sound interesting? You bet! What changes has this wrought upon the girl, how does this effect the world in which she lives in?
Not a lot. Without going into too much detail, Robert’s book is not one for people who like fast paced, page turners. It’s a satire of our society today and rumbles along at the speed of a slug. Just to give some indication, it takes over a hundred pages for the text of the blurb to be played out, in which time, I’ve learnt more about the vacuous space that is the main character than I ever wanted to.

For a book so rich in its premise, there is a very meagre amount of actual plot. What there is, is padded out with drivel about the main character’s day, accompanied by mind-numbing passages of intensely dull philosophical thoughts about love or joy or despair or whatever emotion the character experiencing.

I understand why the information is presented like this. The world the character has grown up in is very different from ours and that is simply how he thinks. Never the less, I find myself skipping entire passages so I can move on with the story. While the thoughts add depth to character, they leech any enjoyment out of the book.
Which brings me around to my main point. Why, with such a blisteringly good idea for a world and plot, did Roberts choose the most boring man to be the main character? Why not the daughter, whose life would be infinitely more interesting to follow? Why not one of the poor, into whose village the young girl is taken? George, the father, has nothing to say, nothing to contribute and doesn’t drag the plot with him as much as flounder after it. Because of his background, brought up in a self-serving privileged society, he is completely unlikeable. I cannot relate to him.

I should point out that if you look up By Light Alone on Google, the reviews that pop up first are full up of praise. And I will admit, I’m not exactly the brightest spark. But a pondering book where most of the action is happening off screen just isn’t for me, not matter how shiny the cover.

If you manage to make it past those first 150 pages, what you’ll find is that Robert somehow manages to make all his characters as dull and vacuous as George. We do get to see the world from the perspective of George’s daughter and the wife. And I dislike all of them. Still, despite the changes of perspective, very little happens. Since the daughter got back from her kidnapping, her parents have split up and the daughter broke the fridge. Annnnnd that’s about it.

I’m just not interested in the emotional side of these people, especially as they’re meant to be horribly selfish. If I’m not supposed to like these people – and indeed I can’t – why should I read this book? I don’t care about them, I can’t see much plot on the horizon, why bother?

And yet, I have kept reading, possible due to the sheer horror than so boring a book could ever be published.

The last chunk of story is through the eyes of Issa who – spoilers, if you care – is actually the daughter, having be given a new name or possibly forgotten her old one. And this is about the only vaguely interesting bit of the book and even then, I’d never rate it more than one out of five. Issa travels from a village – it’s never really explained where she is to begin with - with little to no sense of purpose and occasionally something happens. And yes, we do see the world of the longhairs and how civilisation has changed for them. But Issa’s lack of motivation, her somewhat hazy personality and Roberts’s brain meltingly boring prose makes it the same turgid brown as the rest of the book. There’s no struggle within Issa, within George or his family to do anything, they just sort of wallow from one event to the next, never really reacting much, never making a difference.

The shame of it all is underneath the weight of all this rubbish, there is a story and it is amazing. It’s unique and original. It could a diamond and sparkle like the stars. But the diamond is coated in substances best left to the imagination so you’ll never see the twinkles.

Lost Girl

If you’ve seen the trailer for Lost Girl you’ve probably not really got anything about the show other than that the main character is a succubus. Which is a shame because it’s a whole lot more than that.
In my last article, I was bemoaning (again) the fact that no series I’d watched recently had managed to make a good pilot episode. There needs to be a simple introduction of characters but with enough information on each to understand their basic traits – this girl is the one who knits the group together, that boy enjoys arguing. The characters must also be likeable, even if they’re evil. The plot of the first episode should put the main character/s into the new situation that will set up the series but not in an obvious way. Lost Girl does that quite well, adding a main and side character into the new world without turning into forty minutes of clichés.
Said world is the main bit that gets missed from that trailer. There are two mob-like groups of fae, made up of the general bag of supernatural characters. One group is called ‘the light’, the other ‘the dark’. Exactly what each side stands for isn’t explained in the pilot. I suspect it could be something akin to the state of affairs in Night Watch where one group controls the night and one the day. Or, it could be more simple than that – light equals good, dark equals bad. Anyway, entry into one of these groups is mandatory for all fae, including the succubus, Bo, who has no idea what she is until the supernatural’s doctor tells her. Since not knowing what you are is unheard of, they immediately subject her to a ‘trial’ followed by a command to choose a side – light or dark. I won’t tell you what happens, but fair to say it got my interest.
Their inclusion of the side character, Kenzi, a human kleptomaniac with a side order of kooky, is perhaps the best part. It’s a small stroke but it adds so much and her relationship with Bo is already fun to watch. Because both are outsiders, I don’t get the ‘audience surrogate’ feel. And, the fact that she’s not some ordinary shop worker who gets pulled into the mix through no fault of her own – Rose Tyler, for instance – means she’s a character who’s forging her own path, not simply trailing in the wake of Bo.
Obviously, it could all go wrong and turn out to be awful from episode two onwards but I have high hopes for Lost Girl and I’m really interested to see where they take it.

Eureka (US) /A Town Called Eureka (UK)

I found Eureka while checking out Warehouse 13 on Wikipedia. Apparently it’s not only a sister show to Warehouse 13 but started some three years before.
If, like me, you’re seen Warehouse 13 before Eureka here are the comparison notes: Eureka is less cuddly, with a significantly bigger cast list. The main character is not really ‘one of the team’ which doesn’t really help. It’s a strange cross of a small town detective and Bang Goes The Theory, with a hint of Castle in the inclusion of the main character’s daughter.
If you’d like that in a more prosaic format littered with spoilers – and let’s face it, why wouldn’t you? – a detective, Jack Carter, finds himself in Eureka after attempting to drive his runaway daughter back to her mother in LA. Eureka is a town filled with scientists who tend to break the rules of the universe and destroy bits of their town while they’re at it. Carter finds himself with a new job after the pilot episode – town sheriff – and he’s been introduced to a super secret sciency institute. Said institute is headed by Dr. Nathan Stark, who is quite closely modelled on Tony Stark – Iron Man for those who aren’t into their comics – and who has a fantastically loveable evil side to him.
Other characters of note are the local B&B owner whose subplot is bizarre and occasionally disturbing, the handyman who builds rocket engines in his spare time and Douglas Fargo, who turns up in Warehouse 13. I love Fargo the most, but I care quite a lot about the whole cast.
Which is why I’ll keep watching. The dialogue is quite hammy in places and the overall feel of Eureka is a bit…lonely. Carter isn’t part of the super secret institute so he’s always the least informed. In Warehouse 13, the main characters are generally in the know and they’re allowed access to any information they need, so the problem is being able to find the information, not simply having access. Yet despite all of that, I want to know what happens next. There’s a very subtle main plot that threads all of the episodes together so there’s always something to be resolved.
Also, talking house situated in an underground bunker. What’s not to like about that? SARAH (Self Actuated Residential Automated Habitat) is a bit like KITT but with some interesting emotions that lead it to, spoilers, trap Carter and some prominent members of the community inside the house until they resolve their differences.
Generally, if you want to describe Eureka, plump for the word ‘quirky’ like everyone else has. Even the music is quirky. The intro is very 1950s, American and small towny. People mowing their lawn with lasers and filling up their hover cards with fuel. Quirky, quirky, quirky. Unfortunately, that means the main word to describe Eureka isn’t, or instance, ‘awesome’ or ‘fantastic’. It’s a bit like someone saying your hairstyle is interesting.
Feel free to check Eureka out – I recommend starting at the beginning – but if you’re looking for a new show to get into, I’d go for Warehouse 13. Either way, enjoy Fargo being cutely clumsy.
*
I’ll be looking at Alphas next week, the newest of the sister shows, which deals with people with superpowers. Heroes remake anyone?